Yes, it’s Monday again, at least in America: March 5, 2018: National Cheez Doodle Day, celebrating a popular comestible made of cheese-flavored styrofoam. In Cornwall it’s St. Piran’s Day (the patron saint of tin miners), celebrated with parades, music, and poetry.

On March 5, 1616, Copernicus’s book On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres was added to the Vatican’s Index of Forbidden Books—73 years after it was first published. On this day in 1770, the Boston Massacre (tame by today’s standards), killed five Americans including the black/Indian man Crispus Attucks: the first American killed in the Revolutionary War. On March 5, 1836, Samuel Colt patented the first mass-produced revolver, a .34 caliber gun. 36 years later, George Westinghouse patented the air brake, saving many lives of brakemen. On this day in 1933, Franklin Roosevelt proclaimed a “bank holiday”, closing all the banks and freezing financial transactions. Although the Great Depression persisted, this helped mitigate it. On that very same day, Hitler’s Nazi Party got 43.9% of the votes in Germany in the last free election in a unified Germany until 1990. Although the Nazis didn’t get a majority, they had enough strength, with the help of other socialist parties, to pass an “Enabling Act,” making Hitler the dictator. On this day in 1946, Churchill first used the phrase “Iron Curtain”, in a speech in Missouri, referring to the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe. On this day in 1953, Stalin died of a cerebral hemorrhage in his dacha outside Moscow. And exactly ten years later, three country music stars, including Patsy Cline, died in a plane crash in Tennessee.

Chuck Yeager reminisces about how he bailed out on this day (remember, he’s 95 years old):

March 5, 1944: Fly to Bordeaux to bomb marina. Obie leading flt.I am tail end Charlie. Weather stinkin'-can't see target;turn to new target. Just as we turn, I alert Obie to 3 bandits on our tail. He calls break. Now I'm lead. Head on pass w/ 3 FW190s. I have to bail. #WWII#P51

I found Ollie’s quiet breathing tame compared with the sound of a chainsaw starting that constitutes George’s super-relaxed sleep noises; I have occasionally been forced to turn up the volume on the TV when he is occupying the spot next to me on the sofa.

Yes. Hitler put the word “Socialist” into the party name because it polled well. They were not a socialist party – they were always fascists. Besides the Social Democrats, there were other socialists, but they called themselves communists, along with the more extreme communists. Communists were among the first rounded up by Hitler once he was in power.

Having Socialist in the name of the Nazi party is something US conservatives have got their jollies off over ever since. I’ve never heard of Europeans making the claim that the Nazis were socialists. They probably have a better general awareness of the political history of the time?

In the Boston Massacre: angry mob is hitting British soldiers with clubs, throwing rocks and snowballs, and calling them names. The soldiers fire into the crowd, killing 5 people. Two soldiers are convicted of manslaughter.

Fast forward 247 years: Daniel Shaver is crawling on floor in a hotel hallway, begging for his life, and is shot dead by a police officer who has “You’re F**ked” inscribed on his weapon. The officer is acquitted.

Regarding one of our similar birds, the American Woodcock, no one hypothesis has been settled on as explanation for the rocking/bobbing walk, but one of the often cited theories is that the vibrations bring worms closer to the surface. (Others point out that they bob on hard surfaces, too–roads & such; worm-theory supporters suggest that that’s just because the bobbing, once adopted due to increased fitness, simply carries over to substrates that are inappropriate for it.)